Your search for the Forrest Fenn treasure might have proved fruitless, but Axle Contemporary is here to delicately line your pockets with the roving gallery’s latest venture, Economologies.
Parting from the idea that many institutions—local and otherwise—might have when it comes to artist grants, Axle's Jerry Wellman and Matthew Chase-Daniel—themselves winners of a recent SPREAD 4.0 grant—have decided to place dollar bills all over town as a kickoff to the greater Economologies project, which officially launches on Aug. 22 and is set to include an exhibition, panels and other special satellite events.
Prior to this, the pair exhibits the dollar bills—1,500 of them to be exact—on Tuesday.
"Our hope is rather simple: to initiate conversation about money, distribution, exchange, banking, value, all the things that enter into the world where economics, ecology and art might meet," Chase-Daniel explains. "Many possibilities exist, perhaps some that have not even been thought yet, so let's see where this project takes us."
The genesis for the gambit, he says, arose during a drive wherein a lone dollar bill blew past his windshield. Soon, it was several notes, and road pandemonium emerged.
"I noticed cars around me braking and swerving. It wasn't much money at all, but it inspired a strong visceral reaction in all of us there," Chase-Daniel says. "I got to thinking as I drove away about money, about cash. It doesn't matter if you are rich or poor, the sight of cash blowing down the road gets attention and provokes reactions and thoughts and reflection of all sorts, positive, negative, joyous, angry, liberated, stressed-out."
The Economologies umbrella is also set to include the issuing of $10 "nanogrants" to folks who submit an idea on the Axle website as to how they would change the world with a tenner.
For Wellman, the discourse is an interesting jumping-off point to rethinking the prevalence cash has or doesn't have in the creative process.
"Axle meets many people as a mobile exhibition space," he points out. "It is remarkable at how many people in our community are concerned with the future of art and commerce and how it all fits into an ecological construct."
Economologies
5-6 pm Tuesday, Aug. 19
Axle Contemporary,
Railyard Shade Structure
Santa Fe Reporter